Long Term Evolution (“LTE”) of the Third Generation Partnership Project (“3GPP”), also referred to as 3GPP LTE, refers to research and development involving the 3GPP Release 8 and beyond, which is the name generally used to describe an ongoing effort across the industry aimed at identifying technologies and capabilities that can improve systems such as the universal mobile telecommunication system (“UMTS”). The goals of this broadly based project include improving communication efficiency, lowering costs, improving services, making use of new spectrum opportunities, and achieving better integration with other open standards. The 3GPP LTE project is not itself a standard-generating effort, but will result in new recommendations for standards for the UMTS. Further developments in these areas are also referred to as Long Term Evolution-Advanced (“LTE-A”).
The evolved UMTS terrestrial radio access network (“E-UTRAN”) in 3GPP includes base stations providing user plane (including packet data convergence protocol/radio link control/medium access control/physical (“PDCP/RLC/MAC/PHY”) sublayers) and control plane (including radio resource control (“RRC”) sublayer) protocol terminations towards wireless communication devices such as cellular telephones. A wireless communication device or terminal is generally known as user equipment (“UE”) or a mobile station (“MS”). A base station is an entity of a communication network often referred to as a Node B or an NB. Particularly in the E-UTRAN, an “evolved” base station is referred to as an eNodeB or an eNB. For details about the overall architecture of the E-UTRAN, see 3GPP Technical Specification (“TS”) 36.300, v8.5.0 (2008-05), which is incorporated herein by reference. The terms base station, NB, eNB, and cell refer generally to equipment providing the wireless-network interface in a cellular telephone system, and will be used interchangeably herein, and include cellular telephone systems other than those designed under 3GPP standards.
Due to uncontrolled circumstances in the operation of a local area network, such as local interference that may be due to unintentional jamming by another radio system operating in the same area or a change in a particular band of frequencies employed by an access point (“AP”) in the local area network, a user equipment may not have access to the local area network. During a period of time of non-network use, such as a period of time out of normal working hours or a period of time during which a member of a family is away from home, an efficient power-save operation may be employed at the access point and at the user equipment. The user equipment that enters the serving area of a local area network may not be able to access, initiate communication with or connect to the local area network due to a lack of an access authorization such as an access key. Thus, the user equipment may not be able to access the local area network (in the case of jamming or due to lack of an access key), or the user equipment may have to do a time- and energy-consuming search for the local area network when the local area network changes an operational parameter such as a frequency band or a channel within the band.
In view of the growing deployment and sensitivity of users to communication performance in local and wide area networks, further improvements are necessary for handling a user equipment's access to a local area network. Therefore, what is needed in the art is an apparatus, system and method for providing access to a local area network for user equipment operable in a wide area network that overcomes the deficiencies of conventional communication systems.